Homemade nuclear

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Many might be alarmed to learn of a homemade nuclear reactor being built next door.

But what if this form of extreme DIY could help solve the world's energy crisis?
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By day, Mark Suppes is a web developer for fashion giant Gucci.

By night, he cycles to a New York warehouse and tinkers with his own nuclear fusion reactor.
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The warehouse is a non-descript building on a tree-lined Brooklyn street, across the road from blocks of apartments, with a grocery store on one corner.

But in reality, it is a lab.
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In a hired workshop on the third floor, a high-pitched buzz emanates from a corner dotted with metal scraps and ominous-looking machinery, as Mr Suppes fires up his device and searches for the answer to a question that has eluded some of the finest scientific minds on the planet.
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We have people in the whole gamut [building reactors] from physicists to electronics people to car mechanics to even one janitor
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In nuclear fusion, atoms are forcibly joined, releasing energy.

It is, say scientists, the "holy grail" of energy production - completely clean and cheap.
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The problem is, no-one has found a way of making fusion reactors produce more energy than they consume to run.
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Mr Suppes, 32, is part of a growing community of "fusioneers" - amateur science junkies who are building homemade fusion reactors, for fun and with an eye to being part of the solution to that problem.
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He is the 38th independent amateur physicist in the world to achieve nuclear fusion from a homemade reactor, according to community site Fusor.net.

Others on the list include a 15-year-old from Michigan and a doctoral student in Ohio.
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Mr Suppes has spent the last two years perfecting his reactor
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I was inspired because I believed I was looking at a technology that could actually work to solve our energy problems, and I believed it was something that I could at least begin to build," Mr Suppes told the BBC.
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While they might un-nerve the neighbours, fusion reactors of this kind are perfectly legal in the US.
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As long as they [private citizens] obtain that material [the components of the reactor] legally, they could do whatever they want," says Anne Stark, senior public information officer for California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
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During fusion, energy is released as atomic nuclei are forced together at high temperatures and pressures to form larger nuclei.
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Scientists say devices like Mr Suppes' pose no real threat to neighbouring communities or the environment because they contain no nuclear materials, such as uranium or plutonium.
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There is no chance of any kind of accident with fusion," says Neil Calder, communications chief for Iter, a multi-national project begun in 1985 with the aim of demonstrating the feasibility of fusion power.
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There's no CO2 pollution, there's no greenhouse gases, you can't use it for proliferation [the spread of nuclear weapons] - it has so many advantages," he said.
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Government-led efforts to produce power from fusion have been going on around the world for 50 years.
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Iter - funded by US, Japan, Russia, India, China, and South Korea - is working on a multi-billion dollar, advanced reactor, due to be built in the south of France by 2019.
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But the availability of equipment and technology has seen an increasing number of amateurs enter the fray.
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Some experts are sceptical that all these people are producing fusion reactions, but when he demonstrates his device, Mr Suppes says a bubble meter placed next to the reactor indicates that a fast neutron, a by-product of fusion, has been produced.
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The amateur scientist began building his reactor two years ago, purchasing parts on eBay with $35,000 of his own money and about $4,000 he raised on a website that connects artists and inventors with private investors.
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Real researchers that are working at Los Alamos [US Department of Energy National Laboratory] and are working at Lawrence Livermore are following this and commenting on it, even though it's not an officially sanctioned project," he says.
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Mr Suppes sees his work in nuclear fusion as more than just a hobby, and he intends to try to build one of the world's first break-even reactors - a facility producing as much energy as it uses to operate.
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He now has to go out and do what everybody else has to do, which is to convince people to invest in his project - whether its government funding or private funding to carry him through," said Mr Calder.
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Nuclear fusion is the source of energy in stars such as the sun
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The best fuels for fusion are two types, or isotopes, of hydrogen - deuterium and tritium
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Energy is released as atomic nuclei are forced together at high temperatures and pressures to form larger nuclei
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Reproducing these conditions on Earth is extremely challenging
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Mr Suppes is hoping to build a break-even reactor from plans created by the late Robert Bussard, a nuclear physicist who drew up plans for a fusion reactor that could convert hydrogen and boron into electricity.
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Work on a scaled up version of a Bussard reactor, funded by the US Navy, has already been taking place in California.
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But Mr Suppes believes he will be able to raise the millions of dollars it takes to build a Bussard reactor because he feels someone with enough money "will feel they cannot pass up the opportunity" to find out if it will work.
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Iter said it would be wrong to dismiss out of hand the notion that an amateur could make a difference.
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I won't say something that puts these guys down, but it's a tricky situation because there is a great deal of money and time and a lot of very experienced scientists working on fusion at the moment, said Mr Calder.
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But that does not eliminate other ideas coming from a different group of people.
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Richard Hull - Fusor.net